Release 1.beta.3 of Bombax is here !!

Hello and thank you to all of you who have been so helpful during this beta period! We've put a ton of hard work into this final beta release and are happy to announce a number of major new features for you to exploit. Assuming there are no 'show-stoppers', within a couple of days we will go live with the first production version of Bombax.
Let's take a look at what release 1.beta.3 of Bombax includes:

* Oracle support. As we mentioned in the 1.beta.2 release Oracle support was written but still in testing. We've expanded that code and completed the testing and are pleased to bring you the only Objective-C wrapper for accessing Oracle that we've ever seen. Trust us, it's _much_ easier than the raw OCI library! :)

* Automatic memory-management BxApp projects. To make it easier to write BxApps with GC support, we now include a BxApp (GC) project type that is automatically set up to use the correct framework and build with GC enabled.

* BxMailer and BxMailerAttachment classes for e-mailing. What every server needs and what is missing from the Cocoa framework, these classes make it really easy to send e-mails with different
headers and attachments by integrating with sendmail. SMTP support is coming soon.....

* BxApp static resource packaging. We've created a very easy but powerful system for including static resources like images and stylesheets with your BxApp. New BxApp projects include a folder named 'static' that automatically makes any of its contents accessible to your BxApp via the staticWebPath: method and
tag. These automatically munge the path to ensure its portable no matter what host or path your BxApp is located at. You can fully configure what the folder reference is named or what URL it uses (like 'media' instead of 'static'). The Bombax server takes advantage of this new system to serve up these static resources using the high performance server, but we've also added a new class, BxStaticFileHandler, to make it easier to serve static files as a pure BxHandler. This is a great packaging feature -- just drop your files in the folder, build, and share!

* Bombax server GUI redesign. This is a _complete_ redesign from head to toe and will make the experience of administering Bombax faster, easier, and more aesthetically pleasing. We looked at different use cases of Bombax and tried to make often-used features more accessible. Among the changes are a separation of monitoring and configuration tasks, a new outline view of your server instances, and
a usage graph.

With these changes we move into the final stages of release- readiness. Our focus over the next few days will be completing the documentation and fixing any bugs folks encounter. Of course, we have some *big* ideas planned for the future both for the framework and for some supporting technology.

Our mission is to make the best web framework possible and we're committed to seeing OS X as the premier server platform running Bombax. Thank you for supporting the development of Bombax and for getting the word out about this platform.

To 2010, the year of OS X servers and Bombax!

You can vist Bombaxtic and download Bombax here.